Slaves of New York

Slaves of New York is a collection of short stories by Tama Janowitz. Its premise is that finding an apartment in Manhattan is so expensive and hard to do that people in the fringes of the art scene, both male and female, end up with undesirable partners simply to have a place to live. Several stories feature Eleanor, who lives with a psychologically abusive visual artist whose work is obviously derivative of cartoons. The title story was published in The New Yorker.